Why Is It So Bad To Be High-Maintenance?
According to Mirriam Webster’s Dictionary high-maintenance is used to describe something that requires a large amount of care or attention. But when it is used to describe a person, it refers to someone who tends to cause problems or demand attention: extremely sensitive, demanding, or temperamental.
This phrase used to annoy me because it’s all too commonly used to degrade a certain type of woman. The type of woman who cares a lot about her appearance or maybe the type of woman who has a lot of standards or expectations. Maybe they would require too much from a significant other, too much money, too much time, or too much attention.
But if we are going by the first definition above, then I don’t know that many women who aren’t high maintenance. Most women I know have high expectations for themselves which require a lot of their own time, their own money, and their own attention.
This includes myself. I put an enormous amount of work into my own life. My appearance and health alone are a lot of work when you take into account working out upwards of 5 times per week, proper sleep and nutrition, and the amount of money I spend on skincare as a start. To maintain my lifestyle I work a demanding job as a technology consultant for a minimum of forty five hours per week as well as study and adjust my financial investments. To maintain my own skills and interests I study language daily, write regularly, and read extensively. And then of course, I’m responsible for maintaining any relationships in my life including friends, family, romantic, sexual, or professional.
That’s a lot of maintenance. But I am the one maintaining all of it.
So I thought to myself, why is this phrase still used so negatively? Even towards women that are doing all the maintaining on their own?
Because if a woman has high standards for herself, she probably has high standards for others - including romantic relationships. And when we break it down like that, I realized I’ve seen insecure prospects label this in numerous ways - ‘high maintenance’ ‘demanding’ ‘intimidating’ ‘unattainable’ ‘bitch’ ‘snob’ etc.
It’s nothing but a trap. Women who are beautiful, charismatic, and smart are usually considered to be in demand. But in order for her to be all of those things, she must be trying really hard (read: high maintenance). But no one wants to think about that. Women are just supposed to effortlessly be all of those things. We’re just supposed to appear with no body hair and abs and shiny hair. We’re supposed to miraculously be well read and socially capable. Magic. And if we’re not all of those things, then we’re less desirable anyways.
It would be really easy to just try and hide all of that maintenance. This is the strategy I used to opt for. I would downplay how much work I was involved in so I could try and cultivate that ‘effortless’ narrative. But it led to two major problems --
Because I would downplay all of my work, I would also never get to truly share my feelings of accomplishment or achievement when I would reach a new goal. I had downplayed the work and my goals were also downplayed by default.
I would start to attract people who were doing less work on themselves. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I would find myself getting frustrated that they didn’t hold themselves to as high a standard as I was holding myself to internally, and this would inevitably lead to conflict. I wrote about this specific issue here.
So what to do? How do you keep your own set of standards without trapping yourself in society’s high-maintenance narrative?
First of all, just don’t compromise your standards for yourself. Keep going after what you want and never minimize your own goals. It may be a little uncomfortable sometimes, but will lead to more satisfaction with yourself and your life in the long run.
The harder part is when it comes to other people. I’ve definitely struggled in this regard, but I’ve found it is important to remember flexibility. You definitely don’t need to allow any energy into your life that won’t bring you closer to your own expectations of yourself, but people can show up in all sorts of different ways. Maybe someone doesn’t focus on the exact same things as you but they still take their self development and self care seriously in other areas of their life. The degree of seriousness and action they take in their own lives can be a better measure than directly comparing standards.
Even though I’ve been called high-maintenance too many times to count, I refuse to see it as an insult anymore. Yes, I’m a lot of work, but I do most of the work myself, and if you’re lucky enough to be around for it, it’ll probably be worth it too.
PC: Marketa Benedetti